Vicki Hartzler beat longtime Democratic Representative Ike Skelton in Missouri and at first glance appears to be delivering some much-needed Real Talk on farm subsidies:

The congresswoman-elect would exempt some of the federal budget’s high-cost categories — including Social Security, Medicare and the Pentagon budget — from cutbacks. But she would not exempt agricultural subsidies, another major area of federal spending popular in rural areas such as west-central Missouri’s Fourth District. Among the many farms to receive such subsidies is the 1,700-acre Hartzler farm, which — according to the Environmental Working Group’s “Farm Subsidy Database” — received about $774,000 in federal payments (mainly commodity subsidies for corn, soybeans and wheat) from 1995 through 2009.

“Everything should be on the table,” she says. While she says some agriculture programs represent a “national defense issue” because they help guarantee that “we have a safety net to make sure we have food security in our country,” Hartzler adds: “Should we continue the CRP [Conservation Reserve] program, where you pay farmers to not plant ground and set it aside for awhile? I’m not sure. The time for that may be over.”

That sounds decent, but as Sallie James observes when you peer into there’s much less here than meets the eye:

Let’s be clear about what Ms. Hartzler is talking about here. Those “some” agricultural programs she says should be guaranteed on “national defense” grounds (see below) are what we commonly think about as “farm subsidies” — payments to farmers to produce certain commodities, whether those payments are funded by taxpayers or consumers. They encourage overproduction and thus alienate our trade partners, complicate efforts to make global trade freer, harm poor farmers abroad and damage America’s reputation in the process. They cost us billions of dollars a year.

What she’s talking about cutting isn’t the main suite of farm price support programs. Instead she’s “open to cutting farm programs that at least pretend to have environmental benefits.” These programs aren’t my favorite idea about how to spend money, but paying land-owners to maintain their land in ecologically sound ways is much less pernicious than paying them to overproduce corn and soybeans. What’s more, it’s a much smaller share of the overall budgetary pie.

Sallie James observes that Republicans’ zeal for spending cuts doesn’t extend to cutting farm subsidies. She might have added that though people usually think of “entitlement” spending as meaning Social Security and Medicare, farm subsidies are another category of spending that would be left unmolested by a cap on “domestic discretionary spending.”

Basically the currently elderly, people living in rural areas, and people whose income depends on the military-industrial complex would all be protected from a drive that focuses specifically on domestic discretionary. Not coincidentally, these are many of the people inclined to vote Republican.

I think it’s important for progressives to get smarter about the fact that there’s really very little evidence for the proposition that there’s a debate in America about the merits of “small government.” There’s a conflict, instead, about whose interests the government should serve—a conflict whose basic contours you can learn a lot about by examining the demographics of each party’s core constituency.

I’ve been reading stories about the skyrocketing cost of kimchee—given by rising prices for napa cabbage—for a couple of weeks now. And I think it’s a sign of how screwy policies toward agricultural trade are that it’s only as of yesterday that “the government has suspended tariffs on imported cabbage and radishes from China.”

Of course the good people of South Korea might want to reconsider the whole idea of sales taxes on Chinese vegetables on a permanent basis. This is a regressive tax on the poorest South Koreans, it disadvantages super-poor Chinese farmers relative to their richer South Korean counterparts, it promotes an inefficient allocation of labor and land resources in South Korea, does nothing for public health, etc.

Meanwhile, though America’s sales taxes on foreign-grown food are lower than those prevailing in most of the developing world we’re not entirely free of this kind of bone-headed policymaking ourselves.

Devin McCullen reminds me that I once tweeted questioning the need for a Department of Agriculture and in response to pushback promised to blog on the topic at greater length. But then I never blogged on it at greater length.

Here’s the argument in brief. The USDA’s activities fall into four broad groups:

1) Things that have nothing to do with agriculture (USDA grad school).
2) Farm subsidization that we shouldn’t be doing.
3) Food safety stuff that could be merged with FDA.
4) Nutrion assistance stuff that could be done by HHS.

I would posit that locating programs aimed at 3) and 4) in a bureaucratic structure dominated by 2) winds up undermining their mission. Food producers, rather than food eaters or social service recipients, are the main “client” of the USDA in a way that compromises the priorities of some of its component agencies. The logo, for example, is meant to suggest amber waves of grain rather than poor children eating nutritious and safe food:

That said, I think the lesson of the Department of Homeland Security is that attempting to rearrange cabinet agencies can create a lot of problems and is probably more trouble than it’s worth. The real agenda here is to curb farm subsidies, which would be hard enough on its own terms.

It would be nice to think that the Tea Partying and “anti-spending” mania sweeping the country might lead to renewed pressure to rethink farm subsidies, but as Donald Carr points out it doesn’t seem to be happening:

But right now, there seem to be plenty of Tea Party-favored candidates who willingly collect government assistance in the form of farm subsidies. In early April, the Washington Post reported that Stephen Fincher, a Tea Party Senate candidate from Tennessee, was facing criticism over his acceptance of farm subsidy payments, as is Indiana Senate candidate Marlin Stutzman. Michele Bachmann’s farm subsidies have opened her up to charges of hypocrisy for her limited government stands.

The situation is similar with members who flaunt their success at steering government money to their home states and districts. In March, at the height of the heath care debate, nine Republican senators sent President Obama a letter decrying his proposed cuts to lavish farm subsidy programs. The senators who signed the letter were Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), senior Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, Pat Roberts (Kan.), Thad Cochran (Miss.), John Thune (S.D.), James Risch (Idaho), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Mike Crapo (Idaho), Kay Bailey Hutchison (Texas) and David Vitter (La).

As I’ve been saying, I think it’s necessary to get past the idea of pointing out “hypocrisy” here. It’s kind of like if a conservative was to say liberals say they like social justice, but really they favor policies that are wrong. “Social justice” is just a phrase, a slogan, something progressives like to talk about, but it doesn’t have any particular content. Similarly, for Tea Partiers “big government” means “stuff we don’t like” it’s not a governing agenda. It’s very common for countries to feature an urban-rural political cleavage. In some instances, the rural areas are more leftwing than the urban areas. But in places like the US where rural areas are more conservative, supporting rural interests is just constitutive of conservative ideology. It’s mistaken, but it’s not really hypocrisy.

Melanie Warner takes a look at growing consumer wariness of high-fructose corn syrup and how many firms are now moving back to making some products with real sugar to appeal to them even though it “costs some 40 percent more.”

Warner notes that scientific evidence that there are special HFCS-related health problems is actually a bit hard to come by, but from a policy point of view I think the key point is that the relative prices for these commodities are substantially impacted by hard-to-justify policy interventions. First off, there are severe restrictions on the ability of Latin American farmers to export sugar to the United States. Second, there are substantial monetary payments to encourage high levels of domestic corn production. The economic and foreign policy case for doing away with this business is extremely compelling, so unless there’s some overwhelming public health reason to prefer corn then the case for changing things up is solid irrespective of these health disputes.

Dana Goldstein did an interview with Bill Gates, timed to coincide with the release of his annual letter about his philanthropic activities, and her writeup on the Gates Foundation raises a number of interesting issues. I thought I might focus on this, though:

The world’s richest man, Gates remains a general promoter of the private sector’s good intentions. One of the Gates Foundation’s newest investments is $7.5 million to link 50,000 poor fruit farmers in Uganda and Kenya to Coca-Cola’s supply chain. The goal is to double the farmers’ income by 2014. Chris McDonald, a business ethicist and Coca-Cola expert, has raised questions about whether the plan could leave poor families economically dependent upon the whims of a multinational corporation, but overall McDonald told the Seattle Times, “This clearly seems like a positive thing.”

What always leaves me scratching my head about uber-rich philanthropists is why so many of their activities are so depoliticized. The state plays an enormous role in the economy and in people’s lives—much larger than any foundation ever could—and one of the biggest ways someone with a lot of money can impact the world is by using the money as a lever to move states. Gates, however, generally doesn’t do this outside the field of K-12 education, and even there, as Dana has written, he tends to steer himself toward relatively safe “centrist” ideas about charter schools and teacher pay (ideas of which I approve, to be clear) rather than tackling the hottest political issues.

And this business with farmers and the Coca-Cola supply chain seems like a great example to me. Poor people really need money, which means they need to be connected with people who have money and might give it to them in exchange for work. Which is to say developed world consumers and the corporations who intermediate our interactions with producers. Hence this supply chain idea. But the biggest thing cutting developed world farmers out of the supply chain for Coca-Cola and others isn’t a logistic issue, it’s developed world agricultural policy. In the US, for example, Coke is made with high-fructose corn syrup thanks to barriers to importing sugar and subsidies for the growing of corn. This kind of thing is incredibly difficult to change even though you’d be hard-pressed to find serious policy analysts who think it’s a good idea. It’s incredibly difficult to change because the interest group pressure is all on the side of US corn and sugar producers. But that’s the kind of dynamic the richest man on the planet could conceivably change.